Talk:Chibania/@comment-39598564-20190627222713
Dang. I started the Historical Earths campaign firmly on the Gaians' side, but the way Red argues and stands up for 'those who can't speak for themselves' really convinced me. Alana's 'I care about humans, and other species should be preserved as long as they are useful to humans.' really put me off. On top of Red's arguments, the Earths gradually had more and more pre-existing life, and I just couldn't find it in my heart anymore to terraform the planets into yet more 'Paradise' green marbles. I already have a ton of those anyways. I found myself looking at the conformity of all my earlier planets and kind of resenting it. Before, I liked turning all of these unlivable planets into beautiful 'perfect' worlds, but now I barely even see the beauty in that. The planets as they are originally are so much more diverse and colorful. I also found myself appreciating those purple icons for Native species in my biospheres so much more than the species I've introduced myself. When an event killed some of them off I was genuinely like 'Nooooooo I was going to save you all! I failed you!", while with the species I introduce myself on other planets my reaction to a whole ecosystem dying tends to be 'Eh, oh well, I'll just make a bunch of new species later." In the beginning the dialogues between Red and Alana were just silly, funny and a bit lame to me, but as I read more of their arguments, I became more invested. In Chibania's dialogue I even got angry at the fictional character of Alana, and wanted to jump into the conversation with my own arguments. I did not at all expect this level of emotional investment on my part, and I think it shows how well these conversations were put together. The arguments feel real and genuine. (But wth Alana?? Sure, we're not going back in time to actually kill early hominids, but we're teaching an algorithm to automatically kill indigenous species upon our arrival on a new planet. Literally what's the difference? Killing sentient beings is fine if they're not human, and inconvenient to us??) My position? Maybe we could terraform planets that absolutely cannot harbor any type of life by themselves, but I am against contaminating any planets that have a sliver of hope for native life. I want to know if life could be possible without water, without DNA, or even life based on friggin' sulfur instead of oxygen, whatever! We don't know what's possible yet! Before terraforming, we'd need a whole lot of research to establish that life really isn't present first, and that is hard. Such 'definitely lifeless' planets are probably the most difficult and costly to terraform out of all of them, so it probably wouldn't be practical to terraform at all if we followed those guidelines. Dangit game, you've turned me into a Hephaestian! And that was the faction I liked least (other than maybe Horizon, screw all corporations) when I started playing a month ago! I initially chose the Gaians!